Vampire Controller (2001) Poster

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4/10
Not particularly good kung-fu horror film.
dbborroughs20 May 2005
I really didn't care for this movie so I didn't really pay much attention to the plot, I think it goes something like this: After two lovers are killed two supernatural "experts" are hired to escort the bodies to their place of burial. Complicating matters is the villain's search for a hidden letter that he suspects is in or on one of the bodies. The dead rise, vampires attack and a great many bad jokes are told. Its told in period style and it allows for some supernatural martial arts antics.

Its not an awful film, but its not a good one. Its the type of movie that would have been better badly dubbed into English since you wouldn't have to work to read the subtitles. The direction is workman like though a bit too loose. Things could have been sped up just a bit. The production is also very set bound with cameras kept very tight on things so as not to real too much, or too little (ie. the very small cast). Its like a Chinese version of a the ultra cheap Hollywood productions from the 1950's or 1940's which had limited resources and and felt like it. Its a low budget programmer thats just not good enough to really be worth bothering with since you've seen it all before done better and with just a bit more skill.

Rent Mr Vampire or the Chinese Ghost Story movies instead
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10/10
slow burn
Mahmood-Buttrumps10 March 2015
Wonderful mix of slapstick goofiness, kung fu action, and horror. This movie created an entirely new genre of HK films and established Yee-Man Man as the Asian Van Helsing. Likely to be too alien to scare Western audiences, the action and folkloric anti-vampire methods should keep anyone entertained. It doesn't start off too exciting, and the time setting up the premise for the story can feel a little overdrawn, but this is a movie that tries to outdo itself with each subsequent action scene. The first one isn't too exciting, (pretty standard kung-fu fare) but by the end things have clearly gone over-the-top and the action more frenetic. You'll see just about everything being used against the main vampire, all the various tricks shown previously and then some. So what I'm saying is that it can be one of those movies that pays off for the patient.

Anyways the film is tons of fun, it has multilayer plot points, a beautiful chick that our main characters get to protect, and some pretty awesome battles with hopping corpses and ghosts. I definitely recommend this to anyone that is a fan of both kung fu and 80s horror. It's cheesy and fun, reminds me a lot of films like "Return of the living dead and Night of the demons in it's style of horror. Definitely 10 stars plus.
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